Where I Come From by Rick Bragg

Author:Rick Bragg [Bragg, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Why I Write About Home

I WRITE ABOUT HOME so I can be certain that someone will. It is not much more complicated than that.

Home for me has always been as much a matter of class as location. My home is not the comfortable South, not the big churches, or the country clubs, or the giant waterfront houses on the lakes, or the columned mansions on the main drags.

Home for me is not a skybox at Alabama or Auburn, or good seats at Turner Field in Atlanta. It is not even the Kiwanis Club, or the Rotarians.

Home is not a thing of position, or standing.

My home is where the working people are, where you still see a Torino every now and then, and people still use motor oil to kill the mange.

It is where the men live who know how to fix their own damn water pump, where the women watch their soap operas on an ancient VCR because they will be at work at midday.

It is where the churches are small, and the houses, too. It is where people cheer for a college they have never seen, where propane tanks shine silver outside mobile homes with redwood decks, where buttercups burst up out of mounds of red mud, encircled by an old tire.

These are not the people of influence who have their names carved into the concrete of banks and schools and churches, whose faces stare back from the society page. As I’ve said, maybe too many times, these are the descendants of people who could only get their name in the newspaper or the history books if they knocked some rich guy off his horse.

I do not, greatly, give a damn about writing about people who history will handle with great care, anyway, by birthright.

I will write about a one-armed man who used to sling a slingblade out by the county jail, and a pulpwood truck driver who could swing a pine pole around like a baseball bat.

I will write about dead police chiefs who treated even the most raggedy old boy with a little respect, and old men who sip beer beside the pool tables in Brother’s Bar, and then go take some money off the college boys.

I will write about the wrongdoers, because sometimes doing right is just too damn hard, and the sorry drunks, and the women who love them anyway. I will write about mommas, not somebody’s Big Daddy. I will write about snuff, not caviar.

I will write and write as long as somebody, anybody, wants me to, till we remind one more heartbroken ol’ boy of his grandfather, or educate one more pampered Yankee on the people of the pines.

I will put on my necktie and do my best to fit in the more comfortable places, and it may be that I have come to like that too much. But it will never last for me, there, and I will always go back to what I understand and admire, and love.

And it may

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